


only human after all

by chronicallyHaughty



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, M/M, Non-explicit almost drowning but everyone's fine, Unplanned daemon touching but again everyone's fine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 15:55:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18759610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chronicallyHaughty/pseuds/chronicallyHaughty
Summary: Hanzo is missing from his perch.The waves are settling back into their regular choppy motion below, and on the gyropad above them Yumiko roars in unbridled fear. The wolf at Jesse’s side flinches.“Shit,” Toya speaks for the both of them.





	only human after all

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Rag’n’Bone Man’s “Human”.  
> Okay so the fucking yacht they’re on is called the Pegasus VIII, if you wanna google that for visuals, which I thought I did until I actually found them and boy howdy, fuck, what a load of rich people horseshit. There are two pools and also a boat in this boat. Fuck. I’m so mad. Fuck. Shit.
> 
> Daemons, popularised in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, are simply put a person’s soul given physical, animal form. There’s a bunch of rules surrounding the idea in the previously mentioned books that I won’t go into, mostly because this is _my_ playground, and I will do as I please.
> 
> ETA: I'm working Pullman's terminology into this as I find myself writing more for the 'verse and wanting to give it this "Otherness" feeling. Nothing else should majorly change. If anything confuses you feel free to ask! :)

The sound of it comes in a lull between the gunfire; the odd splash of water out of beat with the rhythmic wash of rough waves against the ship’s side. As the comms stay silent he assumes someone on the enemy side got thrown overboard by Jack, or maybe even Hanzo.

Jesse fires off a shot that gets a Talon goon between the eyes – sending the hawk soaring above into a cloud of swiftly dissipating golden dust, taking care of that particular spot of trouble – and when he ducks back behind cover he shoots a quick glance up towards the boat’s gyropad where he last saw their resident archer.

Hanzo is missing from his perch.

The waves are settling back into their regular choppy motion below, and on the gyropad above them Yumiko roars in unbridled fear. The wolf at Jesse’s side flinches.

“Shit,” Toya speaks for the both of them.

—————

Hanzo hits the winter-cold water back-first and it takes but the blink of an eye for it to envelop the rest of his body, the shock of it knocking the breath straight out of his lungs. The chill immediately turns his limbs leaden, a sensation not unlike the time Mei-Ling had accidentally hit him with her ice blast during training.

This situation is far more perilous, however, as this time there are no concerned… friends? Well, at the time, _teammates_ to fret over the mistake. No Lúcio to heal him up, no Yumiko glaring at him from afar in an unusual outward display of care for his well being, no Mei-Ling frantically apologizing for something not her fault, no slightly-too-acerbic words from Genji “joking” about how Hanzo of all people should be used to being cold… No McCree to soothe Mei-Ling with his whiskey-warm baritone, all while keeping a keen eye on Hanzo, looking for any signs that he would seek retribution.

Those keen eyes have turned kind. Hanzo’s own ice walls have melted, in no small part thanks to McCree’s persistent overtures of friendship over the past few months. He values all of the new friendships he’s somehow built with many of the Overwatch members during the short time he has spent in their company, just as he values the old relationships he’s repaired, with his brother and his own daemon alike. But McCree, well. The man is far more than the kindly fool he presents himself as, and Hanzo has very much enjoyed puzzling out the intricacies of what parts are real and what parts are simply the persona.

But here and now, there is none of that. There is only the immense weight of the cold water pressing him down, _down,_ farther and farther from the surface. The sky is still dark with night, but the Talon ship the team had boarded has spotlights. They shine on above, accompanied by bright staccato bursts of light; gunshots and pulse rifle rounds, most likely.

He’s been trained for this, to be able to hold his breath in dire situations, but he’d lost so much air with the initial shock of hitting water that there’s precious little of it left to hold.

 _Genji will be so disappointed,_ Hanzo thinks with a twinge of guilt through his stupor. But it’s so _cold,_ and the lights grow ever more distant.

He sinks.

—————

Hanzo’s snow leopard daemon lands heavily on the deck beside them, and Jesse doesn’t think as she gathers herself to leap past him, he just reacts. He doesn’t even realize that he’s grabbed a hold of her with both hands, his bare skin clutching her thick fur, until the touch gives him something like a static shock,numbing him all the way up to his shoulder, like getting _electrocuted._

_—————_

_Heat._

From the center of Hanzo’s chest, it radiates outward, all the way to the tips of his extremities. This indescribable _warmth,_ like drinking hot chocolatl on a rainy day while his brother and Hana shout at their video game nearby. Like feeling warmed by the drink, the gesture, the warm smile of the man who thought to make it for him in the first place…

 _Like_ that, but not exactly. The sensation is not quite physical. Or, not for him. _Yumiko,_ Hanzo realizes distantly, but it doesn’t feel _wrong_ like every touch to her has felt before. _McCree,_ he decides next, and were he more lucid he might laugh at the certainty of that thought.

He’s probably twenty meters below the surface and yet he’s so certain who has touched his soul? Ridiculous.

The warmth is enough to rouse him. Twenty meters or twenty kilometers, one thing remains true. He is a dragon.

Almost as though of its own volition, his left arm raises to point toward the light.

—————

Jesse grabs another man’s _soul._ She shudders but surprisingly doesn’t struggle, stumbling to a stop and almost collapsing in his grip, as he knocks against the railing with the momentum of his rushing to grab her before she foolishly drowned herself. Surprise, Jesse reckons.

Surprise, he feels, when he spies a sudden flashof light in the depths, like an explosion. The ocean starts to boil, and flash, and then, like a bubble, it bursts.

He doesn’t expect he’ll ever get used to the dragons, even if he lives to be a hundred years old. Spirits they may be, but they’re nothing like any daemon Jesse has ever met. Immense and ancient, and _furious,_ they burst from the waves with twin roars underlined by the crackle of lightning, slicing straight through the ship at an angle, without touching it at all.

 _Honey, you got a big storm comin’,_ Jesse thinks inanely as the screaming starts. He hangs onto Hanzo’s Yumiko in one arm and wraps his own Toya safely under his serape with the other. Storms like this you just gotta ride out.

Around him his team wisely huddles down, while the Talon fools start _shooting._ Adorable. Jesse chances a peek over the railing down at the water, but his hopes are short-lived, there’s no smug archer bobbing along on the choppy waves. Hanzo might be on the ocean floor by now for all he knows, fancy light-show notwithstanding–

Yumiko wiggles free, and oh, of course, Hanzo wouldn’t just disappear without Jesse knowing, not when he’s been literally holding the man’s heart in his arms. That is, his _daemon._ Not like, not like _that._ He mentally shakes the strange thought off before heaving himself up.

“Yumi, hold up!” Toya calls, but the big cat ignores her. His wolf tugs on his serape, impatience in every line of her body. “Jess, _c’mon!”_

“I’m comin’, don’t you tear it!”

Jesse hurries down the now blessedly empty stairs, Toya hot on his heels, while Yumiko simply jumps down the last two decks to land on top of a couch by the stern, heedless of the churning chaos wrought by her human’s _other_ spirits. And to think Jesse gets fed up with just the one soul, sometimes. Toya pushes past him to put her front paws up on Yumiko’s couch, speaking to her in a low voice. Always the gentle caretaker, his Toya. This time Yumiko barely spares her a glance, too focused on the water. Her patience is rewarded as Hanzo breaks the surface just as Jesse reaches the daemons, saving him a very uncomfortable swim.

“Do me a favor and stay up here, sweetheart,” he calls to Yumiko as he looks around, and sure enough, he spots a lifebuoy hanging on the wall a bit further toward the bow of the ship.

After that it’s not a difficult task to unhook it, toss it just past Hanzo, and drag it close enough by him that he can grab on. Yumiko leaps down to the low stern of the leisure yacht while the storm dies down around them as suddenly as it hit, leaving the space oppressively silent in contrast. Hanzo makes it to the stern just in time for Jack and his massive dog daemon to come stomping down the stairs and help Jesse haul the waterlogged man back on the ship, that super soldier strength making itself useful.

Team chatter starts back up as they get Hanzo back on board, everyone accounted for, and the soldier neatly dodges Yumiko as she barrels past him to get to Hanzo. A pre-dawn firefight on a ship in the brisk January cold, hauling a fully decked out strike team member out of the ice-cold water, and still the man doesn’t have the decency to even _pretend_ to be winded. Ass.

Hanzo and his daemon are murmuring back and forth in Nipponese, foreheads pressed together, eyes closed. It’s painfully intimate to behold, and a startlingly different scene to how they were acting around one another even two months ago, what with the icy silence, refusing to look at one another, or even be near one another. The improvement is nothing short of miraculous. Good thing Jesse doesn’t seem to have mucked their hard-won progress up by getting handsy.

As if he can hear Jesse’s thoughts, Hanzo looks up from Yumiko’s fussing and meets his eyes. Jesse swallows, all the discomfort he bizarrely _hasn’t_ been feeling since he grabbed the other man’s daemon hitting him all at once. Angela chooses this moment to descend on Hanzo, and Jesse, well, flees. He needs some space to think on what happened and what to do about it.

He moves over to where Lena is securing their own means of travel, a far more modest boat than the one Talon had been using, right hand reflexively clenching around nothing. He’s touched others’ daemons while it was him and Toya against the world, and she’s been grabbed far more than either of them would’ve liked, too. It’s only ever felt like a massive invasion of privacy before.

“If that fur just ain’t the softest thing, Jess,” Toya rumbles quietly from where she lopes along at his side. He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t rightly know how to.

But try as he might, casually touching metal and glass and carbon fibre as he helps Lena and Brigitte tie people up and get things into order for their journey back to land, his fingers refuse to forget the sensation.

—————

Once they finish up, they split the team to take both ships back to shore, with Jesse ending up on the Talon ship with Angela and Hanzo, the prisoners with Jack, Lena, and Bree. On their end, Angela is up top steering the ship, while Jesse has been left with the stern instruction to “keep Hanzo warm” – of course she doesn’t know what happened, but Jesse half-heartedly curses her phrasing, anyway.

Hanzo is in the top-floor salon – the damn boat has _multiple_ salons, some folks really are way too rich for _anyone’s_ dang good  – looking decidedly undignified, bundled up as he is. Jesse counts three blankets, at least one of them heated, and one snow leopard daemon draped on top. With a sigh, Jesse figures he might as well get the awkwardness over with as soon as possible, and slumps down on the couch next to the guy. Toya takes up a position on his other side, weather eye on the large panorama window lining the back of the room. Say what you will about rich folks, they’re good at indulging. It’s a damn nice boat. Toya huffs out a sigh, wordlessly telling him to quit stalling.

“Comfy?” Jesse directs at Hanzo, knowing better than to expect a reply from the cat (unless, of course, she’s in the mood to bother her human with her disregard for what the man would consider acceptable daemon-human manners). He keeps his eyes staring resolutely ahead. There’s just a hint of a sunrise at the horizon. Maybe they’ll have time to grab breakfast in Ilios proper before they have to fly back to Gibraltarik.

“Mm,” Hanzo replies.

A sudden warm weight hits Jesse’s side. Surprised, he turns his head and finds his beard catching on fur. Yumiko has shifted her body so she’s wedged between them, her big head fitting snugly against Hanzo’s neck and back pressing against Jesse, fluffy tail resting across Jesse’s lap. Above her head, Hanzo blinks at him, once, twice, and then a smile, Jesse’s favorite smile, spreads across his face. Jesse grins right back, and this time when Toya sighs, it’s with contentment.

Looks like things will work out just fine after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Boat terms are difficult enough in Swedish, okay, my semi-sincere apologies to any yacht enthusiasts out there. And it’s not overt or anything, but [this gorgeous art](http://nattvingen.tumblr.com/post/183553563636) did come to mind while I was writing that one part. I have so, _so_ many Fun Thoughts™ on Hanzo’s fraught relationship with his daemon after they killed Genji (short version: she wasn’t a fan) but idk how to put it into words so please feel free to think on that on your own. Thanks to the folks over at The Daemon Forum for writing up all these cool analyses of animals-as-daemons, check ‘em out if you’re curious!
> 
> List of the daemons:  
> Jesse – Toya, female Ethiopian wolf  
> Hanzo – Yumiko, female snow leopard  
> Jack – Sirius, male Tibetan mastiff  
> Angela – Archimedes, male domestic cat  
> Lena – Gale, male ferret  
> Brigitte – Brokkr, male gray wolf
> 
> [Writing Tumblr](http://chronicallyhaughty.tumblr.com/) | [Main Tumblr](http://nattvingen.tumblr.com/) | [Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/Feloss)


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